Freshly Minted with Pathstats

After putting it off for a long while now, I finally upgraded to version 1.29 of Mint. Initially I planned to upgrade, but instead I decided to drop the MySQL tables and start from scratch, installing only peppers (Mint plugins) that I intend to use.

As I was cruising through the latest peppers at Peppermint Tea, I came across a post that the author of the Pathstats Pepper was giving away 250 copies of it for free on his 25th birthday. His birthday was on July 19th and as of the 26th, he had only given away 165, so I went ahead and snagged my free copy. Even though he normally only charges $3.80 (the price of a Marble Mocha Macchiato at Starbucks), I probably would not have payed to give the plugin a shot. After toying around with it for the last few minutes though, I’m starting to feel the love. Here’s what the Pathstats panel looked like after a few minutes online:

As you can see, 6 of the 7 visitors shown were “one hit wonders”. They came, they saw, they left. That’s usually the way most search engine visitors behave, which is why I advocate conditional advertising targeted at these types of visitors. If they do happen to wander on to another page of my site, the ads are turned off because the PHP that tells the site whether or not to show ads is based on the referring URL. There is one visitor however who saw more than one page of my site before leaving. Oddly enough, that person came from a query at MSN for “removing popcorn ceilings” and then they browsed around for over 6 minutes. To see the navigation path of any of the users within Pathstats, all you have to do is click on a row to expand it. If you click on the image above, you can see the expanded view of my amazing 6 minute visitor. I can see this little pepper being a handy tool for analyzing site traffic. Sure, Google Analytics can do that, but it’s so bulky and saturated with unnecessary features. That’s why Mint is still my most used method of website stat tracking.

I agree and disagree Justin. I’m all for free software/music/etc. but if somebody puts a lot of time into something, they reserve the right to fair compensation. That compensation doesn’t have to come through charging a fee though. A donation link is a more accepted method, especially for something as small scale as a plugin.

Speaking of plugins, my new favorite OSX Dashboard widget is Dineomatic from the Iconfactory. You fill in all the restaurants you can think of for each category. Then, the next time you want to eat out, it picks a category and then a restaurant. I know, it doesn’t sound all the exciting, but it’s very well done…and free.

@Justin: I understand your fealing about small things not being free, but I don’t think my plugin has to add very much value to be worth $3.80. Also in my experience software offered for free with donations excepted rarely ever recieve donations (I know I personally have only donated a very few times.) I’ll also let you know that I’ve given away almost 3 times the number of copies as i’ve sold (Jason recieved one of those) so between that and the low price I’ve set i hope you don’t think I’m being greedy either.